A Savannah cruise port: Host cities pay a price

Looking every bit the Southern gentleman in a suit jacket and red bow tie, Dr. Gil Baldwin shows off his well-kept home just blocks from the Charleston, S.C., waterfront.

A wrought iron gate guards his iconic side porch, which is usually a source of pride and pleasure.

But not this day.

With the 2,675-passenger Carnival Fantasy in port, Baldwin's thoughts focus not on pride or pleasure, but on pollution.

He takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes the porch railing and shows the black smudge that results.

"That is probably the most carcinogenic substance known to man," said Baldwin, who practiced internal medicine, hematology and oncology for 38 years. "It's burned hydrocarbon that breaks down into sulfur dioxide, lead, nitrogen and CO2, as well as what you would call cigarette tar."

Charleston, a home port for Carnival since 2010, had 84 cruise ship embarkations and port-of-call visits last year. Along with soot, the ships bring onslaughts of tourists, many of whom drive in and out all at once, which creates traffic jams in this historic port city.

Downtowners, including Baldwin's neighbor, Carrie Agnew, formed a nonprofit called Charleston Communities for Cruise Control to voice these complaints and others, including the hard-to-express feeling that the once welcoming Charleston culture erodes a bit every time a wave of cruisers descends on the historic area.

As Savannah contemplates becoming a home port, these effects and others are on the minds of some Savannah residents, too.

"There's no question a cruise ship terminal affects every single intangible aspect of life," said Kent Harrington, a downtown Savannah resident who launched a Facebook page "Cruise Ships in Savannah" and co-founded Be Smart Savannah, which he describes as a community discussion group.

"Every time proponents talk about a cruise terminal, they're rationalizing the impact by citing the economic benefit," he said. "That tells you even the proponents recognize that putting an industrial component in the heart of the city has significant effects on what that city is."

Environmental effects

Among those effects are environmental ones. Cruise ships saw their environmental image sink in 1999, when Royal Caribbean pleaded guilty to 21 counts of dumping oil and hazardous chemicals and lying to the U.S. Coast Guard, resulting in $18 million in fines.

By many measures, Royal Caribbean and others have cleaned up their act since then.

Jamie Sweeting, former chief environmental officer for Royal Caribbean, said that company's passengers now produce a smaller environmental footprint on ships than at home in three of four categories - water use, plus waste and wastewater production.

Air pollution remains higher than at home, though Sweeting noted his former company has reduced emissions by about a fifth.

Some of those improvements were mandated, as some jurisdictions, notably Alaska and California, tightened up regulations regarding the discharge of treated sewage and gray water from cruise ships. But the law's reach is limited.

"Really, beyond three nautical miles, there aren't any real restrictions," said Marcie Keever, oceans and vessels project director at the nonprofit environmental group Friends of the Earth,

Air pollution regulations are an exception.

Since August, new international standards require cruise ships to burn cleaner fuel within 200 miles of the shore.

That standard will automatically tighten even further in 2015, down to fuel that contains 1,000 parts per million sulfur.

But cleaner is still a relative thing.

"Bunker fuel is so dirty that even the cleaner bunker fuel is hundreds of times dirtier than on-road diesel fuel," Keever said, referring to the fact that the current fuel is 650 times dirtier than truck diesel fuel.

Cruise ships run their engines while in port to power the cabins for passengers and crew.

For a 2,500-passenger ship with a crew of 1,000, the sulfur dioxide emissions for a 10-hour stay equal that of more than 34,000 diesel trucks idling for the same amount of time, based on calculations vetted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"It's insane, and it's not something people really think about because it's just out there sitting," said Katie Zimmerman, project manager with the Coastal Conservation League in Charleston.

Friends of the Earth periodically grades cruise lines on their environmental performance. Ships and cruise lines can earn better grades by installing advanced wastewater treatment, which more than half of ships have done, and by plugging in to on-shore power.

The latter eliminates the need to burn bunker fuel while in port. Instead, ships plug into the grid when they're docked. Not all ports and only 23 cruise ships have the capability for cold-ironing, as it's called. Still, it's what Baldwin is advocating for - so far unsuccessfully - in Charleston.

"When I look out my window, 200 meters away is a ship burning, if you just want to call it No. 4 (bunker) fuel ... it's still toxic," Baldwin said at a Charleston symposium on cruise ships in historic port communities.

"My point is burning nothing is better than burning anything for your health."

But there are subtler issues, too. The cruiseship tourists are changing how she feels about living downtown.

Agnew, a Pittsburgh native who moved to Charleston almost 13 years ago, also spoke at the Charleston conference sponsored by the World Monument Fund, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Preservation Society of Georgia.

A history buff who chose to live in a historic home, Agnew relishes being an ambassador for her adopted city. Or she did before the cruise ships.

"I love when people are walking down the street asking questions," Agnew said. "But when it's 2,000 people two-plus times a week, it makes a sunny day a little bit cloudy."

Ever since a pair of cruise passengers wandered up to her second-floor piazza asking to use the bathroom, she's had to keep her door locked on cruise days, she said.

Charleston cruise supporters, including the S.C. Ports Authority, have labeled concerns like these elitist, even spearheading a "Jobs not snobs" campaign.

Pam Zaresk, president of the Maritime Association of South Carolina, is one of those supporters.

"We are not a gated community," she said. "You can't say, 'You can't come to our city unless you're a certain kind of tourist.' I look at the cruises as a great way, a sizeable way, to expose our city, to share our city.

"It's another avenue for tourism, and we have to stay open to as many avenues as we can. … We have a gem. We need to share it."

The city and the state Ports Authority have a voluntary cruise management agreement that limits the number of ship visits to 104 a year and will not allow more than one ship visit at a time, she said.

Though opponents disagree with her assessment, Zaresk believes the agreement will allow the city to manage the flow of tourists.

At the Charleston conference, representatives of historic sites around the world bemoaned how influxes of cruise passengers overwhelmed their cities.

Thousands of passengers disembarking at once have clogged the narrow alleys of Dbrovnik, Croatia. In Venice, Italy, behemoth cruise ships loom over the romantic canals.

In Falmouth, Jamaica, passengers are directed into a terminal area that re-creates local architecture to give tourists the feel of the Caribbean without venturing into town, Gustavo Araoz said. Local residents have limited access to the facility and when he visited, only about 100 passengers left the terminal. They were greeted by residents who were expecting a much larger crowd.

"They had prepared a little carnival that was self-demeaning," Araoz said.

"It showed they were willing to transform themselves into whatever the tourists think they should be."

Paulo Motta, an Italian preservationist, described the trouble encountered by tiny Valletta, Malta, a centuries-old city of about 8,000 residents, when that population doubled with cruise passengers.

In Charleston, the blue and red funnel of the Carnival Fantasy rises high over the nearby buildings. Adding insult to injury, it looks like a fin growing out of the Historic Charleston Foundation building, said Randy Pelzer, head of the Charlestowne Neighborhood Cruise Ship Task Force.

"It's offensive," he said. "I can't put a dollar value on what that fin costs Charleston. But I guarantee any Charlestonian feels offended having that fin next to our beautiful steeples."

Motta was blunt in his assessment.

"The impact on the waterfront of an historic city is 95 percent for sure in damage," he said.

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